The empty nest

 

At the beginning of Spring, we discovered that a mama Robin had built a nest right outside of Jacob's window in the lilac bushes. Jonathan excitedly checked the nest every morning and night to make sure that those little babies were okay and that the mama was doing a good job feeding them. Every morning Jonathan would beg me to take a picture of the birds....so I would start to go and find my camera to take the picture and then of course, I inevitably got off track and forgot about it until the day I opened the shades to look out at this scene and discovered that I had waited too long and the birds had finally flown away.

So....I decided that the empty nest is a metaphor for my life. I sometimes feel like the mouse in "If you give a mouse a cookie". I head for the bedroom to grab my camera and notice the laundry on the floor, so I scoop it up and head downstairs to throw it in the washing machine. While I'm down there I notice that the garbage has been dumped over so I head out to the patio to find my broom to sweep it up and while I'm there I notice that I need to put one more coat of paint on my flower pots. I stop to give them a final coat and notice that I need more newspaper to put underneath them so I head out to the garage to get more newspaper and when I get there I find the bottles I meant to store up at Big Pa's house so I put them in the back of the car. I mean to head up the road, but notice that the weeds are overtaking my flowers so I stop to pull a couple of them out. By this time Jacob is tired and hungry, so we head back in the house to feed him and change a diaper, but then the phone rings and.......

Sometimes I wonder why I'm so tired at the end of the day and I have nothing to show for my efforts. That would be focus-----I haven't got much! I hope that I don't miss out on this season of my life, because I'm so easily distracted by the multitude of tasks that are continually before me----just as they are before any mom! So...I guess my hope is that someday I don't wake up and find that all my little babies have flown away and that I have missed the moments that I was going to share with them watching the robin mama feed her babies and teach them how to fly. She seems a lot more focused then I do!